Apple has released the rebuilt Siri as a beta, and the assistant it spent years promising now runs on Google's Gemini models. Processing is split between the device and Apple's Private Cloud Compute servers. The new Siri reads what is on screen, draws on personal context from messages, email and photos, and carries out multi-step tasks across apps. It ships in English only. It does not ship at all in the European Union or China.
The delays behind it were costly. The rollout slipped repeatedly, and some employees lost their jobs over it. What has now arrived is the next generation of Apple Intelligence, a Siri rebuilt rather than patched, and a gap to a competitor narrowed with Google's help rather than Apple's own models.
French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese and Spanish are due next month. The features belong to the 2027 software releases: iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27 and visionOS 27. Apple says the underlying models run partly on the device and partly through Private Cloud Compute, and that personal data is neither stored nor made available to the company.
The capability Apple has been selling since the first announcement is personal context. Siri is meant to pull from messages, email and photos, read the screen, and search the web, and to act inside apps at the system level: compose a mail, edit a photo, share it. Apple's own example is asking Siri to find a family recipe in Messages and move the ingredients into Reminders. Third-party support is there at launch for WhatsApp and Audible, with Outlook, Notability and Tripsy promised later.
The assistant answers to "Hey Siri", the side button, Dynamic Island, and on iPad and Mac to Spotlight. A standalone Siri app syncs chat history through iCloud. Apple has added new voices and rewritten dictation, which it says runs on an on-device model called AFM Core Advanced.
The rest of Apple Intelligence spreads across the system. Photos gains Spatial Reframing, Extend and a reworked Clean Up. Image Playground now produces photorealistic images through Private Cloud Compute and is supposed to adopt the SynthID standard for marking AI-generated images. Safari sorts tabs by topic and flags changes on sites. Shortcuts accepts plain-language descriptions of what an action should do. Audio Intelligence for the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 arrives later this year, along with a redesigned Health app.
Early testers are cautiously positive and specific about where it breaks. TechCrunch's Ivan Mehta, who has run iOS 27 since the beta, calls the new Siri a step forward and says he has gone back to using the assistant for multi-step requests and screen-aware questions after abandoning it, as many users did. Early developer builds saved notes to the wrong place.
Dan Moren at Six Colors reached a similar verdict: Siri now helps in ordinary situations, and in one case found an old podcast episode through CarPlay from nothing but its subject. He also reports comprehension errors that remain and answers that are invented outright, and finds the constant offers to help with writing intrusive. His summary is that Siri AI mostly matches what Apple promised, and arrived several years after the date Apple gave.
MacStories was harder on the central feature. Federico Viticci praised the screen reading but said the assistant repeatedly failed to answer questions about his personal context even when the information was sitting in his own messages, and that some answers were out of date.
Then the geography. Siri AI and everything built on it are unavailable in the EU at this stage on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, and Apple says it is looking for a way to launch them while meeting privacy and security requirements. China is out until regulatory questions are resolved. Some server-side features carry daily usage limits, and broader access will eventually be paid.
That last cluster of facts is the story, and it reads like an admission. Apple's argument for Apple Intelligence has always been that Apple is the company you can trust with the contents of your phone. The first markets excluded are the one with the world's strictest privacy regime and the one with the strictest data-localisation regime — and Apple's stated reason for the EU exclusion is that it is still working out how to comply with privacy and security requirements. A privacy architecture that cannot be shipped into the strictest privacy jurisdiction is not a finished privacy architecture.
The second admission is quieter. Siri is summoned by a hardware button, and there is now a rate limit behind that button, with a paid tier behind the rate limit. Metering has moved inside the operating system. And the intelligence doing the work belongs to a supplier that is also a rival: Apple's most prominent system surface is now dependent on Google's model roadmap. Meanwhile the one feature that caused the delays and the firings — understanding personal context — is precisely the one Viticci says still fails on his own messages.
Nothing in the announcement says what Apple pays Google, how long the arrangement runs, what happens to Siri if Gemini's models or terms change, when the EU gets the feature, how large the daily limits are, or what the paid tier will cost. Those six silences describe the actual shape of the product better than any of the demos do.
Apple has spent a decade teaching people that the assistant is the part of the phone you hold the button down for. It has now made that part rented, metered, and unavailable in the EU and China — and shipped it anyway, because being late was the more expensive option.